Cadillac Ad Tries to Bridge Nation’s Chasm, Without Falling In

A Cadillac CT6 being prepared for the opening of the Chicago Auto Show in early February. Cadillacs have been used by every president since Woodrow Wilson.

Scott Olson / Getty Images

February 23, 2017

Common Sense

By JAMES B. STEWART

Can a luxury auto ad help bridge the deep political chasm in America — and, while it’s at it, sell cars?

General Motors’ Cadillac division is about to find out.

On Sunday, its new advertising campaign will make its debut during the Oscars broadcast on ABC, which is, after the Super Bowl, the biggest showcase for national television ads. (ABC said it had sold out the broadcast, taking in about $2 million per 30-second spot.)

In an effort to distinguish the company from its German and Japanese rivals in the luxury car segment, Cadillac’s advertising slogan for the past three years has been “Dare Greatly.” In the opening line of its new 60-second ad, that’s just what Cadillac seems to be doing. Over footage of a street demonstration, the narrator says bluntly, “We are a nation divided.”

“We had to get the elephant out of the room,” Uwe Ellinghaus, Cadillac’s chief marketing officer, told me this week when I visited Cadillac’s sleek headquarters in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood for a preview of the ads. “You can’t deny this. At the same time, you hear this, and you stop immediately. It gets your attention.”

[Video: A Cadillac commercial to be shown on the Oscars broadcast evokes a heritage of working together to overcome challenges and divisions — and places a luxury car within that tradition. Watch on YouTube.]

A Cadillac commercial to be shown on the Oscars broadcast evokes a heritage of working together to overcome challenges and divisions — and places a luxury car within that tradition.

Video by Cadillac

The opening line ends with a subtle but important qualifier: “That’s what they tell us, right? This chasm between us.” It then moves swiftly to a far more positive and inclusive message: What “they don’t tell us” is that “we carry each other forward, no matter who we are, or what we believe, or where we come from.”

Mr. Ellinghaus told me emphatically that he was trying to avoid any partisan stand. “We can have a point of view without adding fuel to any controversial political debate,” he said. “We did a lot of soul searching. What has happened to the American dream? We wanted to celebrate what America is capable of.”

While that may not be impossible in the age of President Trump, it has become far more difficult — as some advertisers learned at their peril during this month’s Super Bowl. Mr. Trump’s election has caused a tectonic shift in advertising — just as it has in media more generally — and themes that might have once seemed innocuous or patriotic have suddenly become politically charged, controversial and divisive.

Budweiser’s flagship Super Bowl message was a gauzy paean to Adolphus Busch, who emigrated to St. Louis from Germany in 1857, was told he “was not wanted here,” yet persevered to create Budweiser and a sprawling brewing empire. According to Anheuser-Busch InBev, as the company is now known, the ad was conceived long before Mr. Trump’s election, and was simply intended to “highlight the ambition of our founder, Adolphus Busch, and his unrelenting pursuit of the American dream.”

Yet the ad prompted an anti-Budweiser boycott campaign on social media by Trump supporters.

“Audi of America is committed to equal pay for equal work,” the ad intoned. “Progress is for everyone.”

But critics quickly charged that such progress apparently stops at Audi headquarters in Ingolstadt, Germany: Audi’s board of management has no women on it. The ad attracted thousands of “dislikes” on Facebook, and a social media campaign accused Audi of liberal bias. (Audi has defended the ad and said it was working “aggressively” to promote women in management.)

Advertisers are bracing for any backlash to Sunday’s Oscars ceremony ads, especially since Meryl Streep drew Mr. Trump’s wrath and a Twitter barrage after criticizing him at this year’s Golden Globes award ceremony.

When it comes to Mr. Trump, Cadillac faces a more delicate task than most. The president and his wife, Melania, arrived at the inauguration in a heavily armored custom Cadillac known as the “Beast,” and the Cadillac brand is indelibly linked to the White House. Cadillacs have been used by every president since Woodrow Wilson.

Uwe Ellinghaus, chief marketing officer of Global Cadillac, said, “We can have a point of view without adding fuel to any controversial political debate.”

Paul Sancya / Associated Press

Like most major national ads, work on Cadillac’s Oscars campaign began nearly a year ago, when Mr. Ellinghaus had dinner with Arthur Sadoun, chief executive of the advertising agency Publicis Communications (and now chairman and chief executive of Publicis Groupe), to discuss this year’s campaign.

Cadillac was in the third year of an ambitious effort to reposition itself as a distinctive global brand. The first iteration of the “Dare Greatly” campaign featured the chanteuse Édith Piaf and iconoclastic personalities like the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Both Mr. Sadoun and Mr. Ellinghaus thought the campaign needed to evolve, while remaining true to its origins. Still, “it didn’t take the results of an election” to know the American public was polarized, Mr. Sadoun said.

Mr. Ellinghaus was adamant that the ad not be overtly political. On the other hand, “I didn’t see how we could shy away from the division in the country,” he said. “We didn’t want to enter the political debate. We wanted to transcend it.”

Perhaps it took two non-Americans — Mr. Sadoun is French, Mr. Ellinghaus is German — to suggest that by acknowledging the divide, an ad campaign might actually help heal it. After all, America had been divided before in its history — at times far more than now. (Hence the image of a civil rights demonstration.) The nation had overcome the divisions, moved forward and prospered, the American dream intact.

For many years (though not in recent decades), the Cadillac brand embodied that dream. Perhaps Cadillac’s ad could remind Americans of the nation’s resilience and inherent optimism, and “celebrate what America is capable of,” Mr. Ellinghaus said.

So the ad moves from images of civil strife to scenes of Americans helping one another and overcoming adversity: police officers embracing; American soldiers returning from battle in Afghanistan; a father running behind his paraplegic son in the last Olympics triathlon; a Hurricane Katrina rescue mission. “We may not be the same, but we can be one,” the narrator concludes. “All it takes is a willingness to dare.”

Cadillac executives didn’t do any formal market testing of the ad, but they did preview it for a few audiences, including a group of Texas Cadillac dealers, who gathered in Dallas a few weeks ago for a meeting with their division leaders. If the ad was likely to cause a backlash from pro-Trump factions, dealers from Texas were as likely as anyone to anticipate it.

“Usually they walk us through the concept, the strategy, what they were hoping to achieve,” said Jacquelin Sewell, who manages Cadillac dealerships in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio as part of the family-owned Sewell Automotive. “This time they just showed it and said the work should speak for itself.”

The reaction, she said, was overwhelmingly enthusiastic.

“We’re all a part of a national conversation that in many ways is very negative,” she said. “But when I talk to our customers on an individual level, there’s a lot of hope. People still believe in the potential of this country. I feel this taps into that in a very powerful way.”

Cadillac has struggled in recent years to translate higher quality and praise from the automotive press for its new models into higher sales in the United States. Last year, Cadillac’s sales in the United States dropped 3 percent to 170,000 units even as overall automotive sales hit a record 17.55 million. (Global sales, however, rose 11 percent, making it Cadillac’s best year for sales in three decades.)

So I had one major question: With only a few glimpses of actual Cadillacs in the ad, and all of those vintage models, will it actually sell cars?

That, everyone involved with the campaign told me, isn’t the main goal of this particular ad. (It will be followed during the awards ceremony with other Cadillac ads spotlighting specific models.) This is a long-term investment that will “elevate the brand,” in Mr. Sadoun’s view.

“Cadillac realizes that it needs to connect with buyers emotionally,” Ms. Sewell said. “That’s never been more true than now in the luxury space.” In the ad, Cadillac is identified with “unity, optimism, courage — the great American values,” she said. “I think dealers and customers, too, are hungry to hear something positive like this.”

Whether Cadillac has managed to transcend the nation’s bitter political divide is ultimately for “the audience to decide,” Mr. Ellinghaus acknowledged. “If you have to explain it afterwards, you’ve failed.”

Correction: March 1, 2017

The Common Sense column on Friday, about Cadillac’s new advertising campaign, described the opening scene from a commercial incorrectly. The footage was of a recent street protest and was made to look archival, not of a civil rights demonstration from the 1960s. The column also misstated, at one point, the given name of a founder of the company that makes Budweiser beer, which was the subject of an ad campaign that recently became politically charged. He was Adolphus Busch, not Augustus.